I needed a secondary phone this week, so I took my old iPhone 6S out of the drawer. I was curious, so I shot a few photos in order to compare the camera capabilities of both phones. To make this a bit more interesting I also took the same photos with my entry-level DSLR camera to see how the phones perform compared to the big sensor.
Shooting in JPEG with the default camera apps
First, I took the photo of the street in JPEG using the default iPhone camera app in iOS 15. On the DSLR I used the default JPEG profile.
🏙 https://i.imgur.com/4W307JO.jpg
As you can see, the photos look quite different, as expected. It's very noticeable how effectively computational photography does its job on the 12 Pro. The photo has crazy dynamic range, the shadows are completely brightened, hence there are a lot more details. The lines and edges are also much sharper. (To be honest, they are maybe a bit too sharp for my taste, when I look at it on a big screen.) The image is very pleasing to the eyes overall, but I think it’s not always as realistic as it should be because of the excessive use of software manipulation. (Especially when I'm in the woods, with a lot of small details, like branches and leaves around.) The image captured by the 6S has much less dynamic range and less details in the dark areas, but it has more contrast, and it looks closer to the real-life scene. I also prefer the FOV of the 6S more, there are much less distortion around the edges. The photo from the DSLR looks closer to the 6S in terms of dynamic range but the colors are more faded and washed out.
🔎 https://i.imgur.com/0B8S0wZ.jpg
If I zoom in and look at the fine details, there is not much of a difference. The image from the DSLR is less noisy and has more details, but this is kind of expected from the larger sensor. (However, it's not as sharp as it should be, because the 18-140mm kit lens I’ve used is quite poor in terms of sharpness, but I don't have a wide prime lens, so I had to stick with it.)
Shooting in RAW with post-processing
I shot the second series of photos in RAW to see how the results look like if I bypass Apple's fancy algorithms. (Since the 6S can't shoot in RAW by default I used Lightroom mobile on both phones, and I applied the same custom preset to all 3 RAW photos after I finished shooting.)
🏙 https://i.imgur.com/pWk7J9v.jpg
If you look at the pictures now, you can see that most of the differences vanished. I was able to lighten the dark areas on the photos taken with the 6S without losing too much details, and I could regain some of those rich blacks and dark areas that I've lost as the result of the aggressive brightening of the default camera app of the 12 Pro.
🔎 https://i.imgur.com/C4N9OmS.jpg
The DSLR still looks better if you zoom in or look at it on a big screen, but the 12 Pro is really close to it and what's even more shocking: even the 6 years old 6S can produce similar photos when there's enough light.
TLDR – If there's enough light the camera capabilities of a six years old iPhone 6S and a one year old 12 Pro aren't as far from each other as I thought before. Computational photography is what makes the difference most of the time. Sometimes it can produce too bright shadows and oversharpened edges in my opinion, but you can control these things if you shoot in RAW.
P.S.1 You can view all the pictures here in full-Res if you want to.
P.S.2 I'm not a native English speaker, so I'm sorry for the poor grammar. :)